My name is Fred and I am a gay conservative living in Ottawa. This blog supports limited government, the right of the State of Israel to live in peace and security, and tries to expose the threat to us all from cultural relativism, post-modernism, and radical Islam.
I am also the founder of the Free Thinking Film Society in Ottawa (www.freethinkingfilms.com)

Friday, October 26, 2007

A report on the Jewish Community in the Netherlands...

Violence against Jews

Anti-Semitic violence by part of the Muslim community poses the most important challenge to the Jewish community. In particular, individuals of Moroccan ethnicity-most of them Berbers from northern Morocco-play a disproportionately large role in physical and verbal violence against the Jewish community.[9]

There have also been many expressions of anti-Semitism in mosques. For instance, in 2001 the El Tawheed mosque had to remove extreme anti-Semitic statements from its website.[10] In 2007, it became known that in the Turkish Milli Görüs mosque in Amsterdam one could find many journals full of "anti-Western, antidemocratic and anti-Semitic texts."[11]

Evers relates how, being easily recognizable as a Jew by his attire, he is regularly insulted for being a Jew, sometimes by Muslims and sometimes by autochthonous Dutch. On one occasion a tram conductor called the police because Muslims threatened the rabbi.[12] In conversations with Jews who are recognizable as such by their physical appearance or clothes, they frequently mention that they have been threatened.

Over the past years, anti-Semitic incidents have occasionally been mentioned in the general press.[13] Many occur in Amsterdam, where more than half of Dutch Jewry and an even larger part of those recognizable as Jews live.In 2003, Rabbi Menachem Sebbag told the Volkskrant daily that his wife had been threatened with a screwdriver by a Moroccan Dutch youngster who said he would cut her heart out. Sebbag, who understands Arabic, also related that someone told him in that language: "I'm going to slaughter you like a pig."[14]

Removing One's Kippa

Ruben Vis, secretary of the NIK, the umbrella organization of the Dutch Ashkenazi community, was quoted in the same article saying he was regularly insulted when wearing a kippa in public. Sometimes he was pushed in the tramway. He noted that since then he never wears his kippa in the western and eastern quarters of Amsterdam, and rarely in the center of the city-places where there are many Dutchmen of Moroccan descent.[15]

A Jewish leader who visited this author in a hotel in the southern part of town was wearing a kippa, but said that in central Amsterdam and neighborhoods where many Muslims live, he wears a cap. Another Dutch Jewish leader mentioned how his son, who wears a kippa, phoned him for help when he was threatened by young Moroccans.

Motti Wolf, a youngster who has left the Netherlands and studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, tells how at the Amsterdam South train station a group of Dutch Moroccans followed him while shouting "Jews to the gas." He mentions that one always had to be alert when wearing a kippa in certain parts of Amsterdam.[16] Wolf also notes that when he was a student at the Jewish high school, he preferred not to visit certain areas where many Muslims live. If he had to go there, he put on a cap instead of a kippa.

The mother of another kippa-wearing youngster who now lives in Israel recounted that her son had been insulted about ten years ago in an Amsterdam museum by a group of young Muslim girls who called out "to the gas." Although kippa wearers are few in the Netherlands, many of them have similar experiences.

1 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Truth is, I can't understand why Jews would stay in Europe. Between the old time Jew hating nationalists, an the up-and-coming jew hating Islamists, there is no future in Europe for Jews. The way the winds are blowing is sooooo obvious.

They should pack their bags, bring their money & work ethic and skills here, and let Europe drown in its hatred and upcoming civil wars.

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My name is Fred and I am a gay conservative living in Ottawa. This blog supports limited government, the right of the State of Israel to live in peace and security, and tries to expose the threat to us all from cultural relativism, post-modernism, and radical Islam.
I am also the founder of the Free Thinking Film Society in Ottawa (www.freethinkingfilms.com)